RON HYNES
BREAKWATER P.O. Box 2188, St. John’s, NL, Canada, A1C 6E6 WWW.BREAKWATERBOOKS.COM |
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Sawler, Harvey, 1954-, author
One man grand band : the lyrical life of Ron Hynes / Harvey Sawler.
ISBN 978-1-55081-631-0 (paperback)
1. Hynes, Ron. 2. Composers--Canada--Biography.
3. Singers--Canada--Biography. I.Title.
ML410.H997S27 2016 782.42164092 C2016-900763-4
Copyright © 2016 Harvey Sawler
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means–graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or storing in an information retrieval system of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to Access Copyright, One Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1E5.
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FOR CHARLOTTE STEWART
“The music business is a cruel
and shallow money trench,
a long plastic hallway where
thieves and pimps run free,
and good men die like dogs.
There’s also a negative side.”
HUNTER THOMPSON
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART I – THE INNOCENCE
Charlie Freeburn’s Meadow
Ferryland
Ronald ‘St. Joseph’ Hynes
Mistaken Point
PART II – THE MUSIC
Del Shannon
Obsession
The WGB
Straight Man
The Girls and the Style
O’Brien’s
PART III – THE TROUBLES
Crazy
How Thick is Blood
The Devil
On the Road
72 Hours
Sunday Morning Coming Down
No Show
The Angel
PART IV – THE ARTISTRY
Gordon, Gene, and Tom
The Ruination of Art
The Newfie Bullet
Canada’s Danny Boy
Thieves from Ireland
The Final Breath
St. John’s Waltz
Luke the Drifter
PART V – THE LEGACY
Picasso of Song
Great Big Fan
The Grand Voyeur
The Bard of George St.
The Ron Swagger
Riding Off Into the Sunset
DISCOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“It is those we live with and should know who elude us, but we can still love them. We can love completely without complete understanding.”
NORMAN MCLEAN
(the signature line at the end of Ron’s e-mails throughout 2015)
IF THERE IS ANYTHING I LEARNED through my time with Ron Hynes, it was this: expect the unexpected.
Like the odd fact that he was a student at the Arthur Murray School of Dance in Victoria, British Columbia, when he was twenty-three and, according to Ron, that actor and fellow Newfoundlander Gordon Pinsent did the very same thing, but in Montreal. Or that he absolutely loved shopping for hats and boots and scarves and jackets. Or that his girlfriend was a doctor in far flung Toronto. Or that he loved old westerns. Or that he wore salon-applied acrylic fingernails in order to play guitar. Or that he relished the idea, like American country legend Hank Williams, of having an alter ego. Or that he handed around his prized instruments with great regularity and then usually regretted doing so. Or that during his worst infestations involving crack cocaine, he could seem like Jack Nicholson’s horrifying character, Jack Torrance, in The Shining. Or that, like great photographers who see images the rest of us don’t see, Ron could find the value and romance and tragedy and beauty of stories where most of us might see no story whatsoever—stories which he translated into lyrics and melody.
Or how about the crazy fact that on the verge of dying, on November 12, 2015, he asked me to join him on LinkedIn. Six days later, on November 19, he died at around 6 p.m.
With so many dimensions, it was easy in the beginning to become hooked on the narcotic of Ron Hynes. Then at other moments, it became just as easy to consider abandoning this biography project altogether. Until his closing months in 2015, as he became more and more responsive to my questions and absorbed in the fact the biography was happening, I never really knew whether Ron might simply walk away from the project himself.
In his final days, his sense of humour remained intact. On November 6, he e-mailed to see how the book was coming along.
Winter slowly creeping in here. Any news from your way re a first draft of a finish of the Ron saga? Wouldn’t have your life for love or money putting word to paper concerning a ragged assed contender like me.
Although I knew through the grapevine what state he was in, that he was basically on his last legs, I laughed out loud when I read the note. And more so when he wrote later that day to say his next album would be titled The Ragged Ass Contender.
Earlier, on November 4, after Ron had gone public through Newfoundland mainstream and all forms of social media about his cancer having reappeared, he wrote to me in the middle of the night.
The Facebook post I wrote yesterday afternoon now has a response close to 500 and counting. It’s close to three a.m. and I’m wide awake with gut wrenching pain. For someone who’s attempting to alleviate the anxiety of his audience, this isn’t the way I should be feeling.
After a long and winding road, involved as I was on the fringe of his life, I suddenly felt very close to him.
The initial idea to write Ron’s biography sprang from a discussion with his agent and manager, Charles MacPhail, a central Canadian having absolutely no real connection to Newfoundland other than his coincidental relationship with Ron. Commissioned in 2013 to write a fiftieth anniversary book for the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, I met MacPhail during a phone call while seeking Ron’s inclusion in a section of that book which was themed to focus on fifty remarkable or well-known Canadians who’d had a connection to the Centre. Ron, of course, was one of these individuals and he does appear in that book alongside forty-nine other artists: singers, dancers, comedians, actors, authors, and visual artists.
MacPhail, a bearded, balding, gray-haired guy who loved Ron, cursed and complained incessantly about trying to manage Ron’s music career and his personal life and finances. He grumbled and groaned to me more than just a few times that he really didn’t need the endless complications associated with Ron Hynes in his life. He’d rather just maneuver his ride-on lawn mower and grow hostas in his Perth, Ontario, backyard. But MacPhail’s problem was he loved Ron Hynes. He really had no choice. He could not abstain from Ron Hynes. As it became for me, Ron was MacPhail’s DOC or drug of choice. And we both knew there was no twelve-step program for our uncontrollable compulsion.
Ron was a remarkable Canadian for all kinds of reasons—some personal, but most having to do with his very public success in the music business; some highly appealing and some not so appealing. He was, after all, a six-time East Coast Music Award winner, a Genie Award winner, and a past JUNO, Canadian County Music Association, and Canadian Folk Music Awards nominee. He was recipient of the 2008 SOCAN National Achievement Award for songwriting career success, and holds an honorary PhD from Memorial University for his contributions to the cultural life of his beloved Newfoundland and Labrador. He has also been a recipient of both Artist of The Year and the prestigious Arts Achievement Award from the Newfoundland & Labrador Arts Council, as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award from the St. John’s Folk Arts Council. From1974 to1976, Ron was the in-house composer for the Mummers Troupe—it was while touring with the Mummers in 1976 that he imagined and composed his signature song, “Sonny’s Dream,” an inspiration from God, he felt, that happened in just ten minutes with a pencil and scribbler in hand on a highway in Saskatchewan. He’d spent an interminable amount of hours worried that he’d heard the tune someplace before, the way Paul McCartney is said to have agonized over whether the song “Yesterday” had come from some place other than his own ingenious mind.
Ron also composed music and lyrics for East End Story, Dying Hard, The IWA Show, and The Price of Fish. His songs have been recorded by artists world-wide, including Emmylou Harris, Mary Black, Christy Moore, Denny Doherty, Murray McLauchlan, John McDermott, Prairie Oyster, The Cottars, Hayley Westenra, and many more. He was, irrefutably, a remarkable Canadian.
One discussion led to another with MacPhail and it suddenly occurred to me (and MacPhail confirmed) that no one had taken a serious cut at writing Ron’s biography. There’d been a feature-length documentary film with Ron as the subject, Bill MacGillivray’s The Man of a Thousand Songs, but oddly, no book. A couple of writers had apparently begun discussions at different intervals, but nothing concrete ever materialized.
MacPhail was keen, so I pursued and landed a publisher and we then set about to convince Ron that his biography would be a good thing. He didn’t know me from Adam, a writer from another Atlantic island, Prince Edward Island. Admittedly, it was a long, slow crawl before I felt confident that I could count on him to cooperate in seeing the book through. The perilous thing about biographies—and I’ve worked on several—is that an authorized work normally demands the complete cooperation of the subject. There is also always the risk of pouring a ton of work into a biography only to have the subject change his or her mind and go south on the idea. Writing Ron’s biography was extremely shaky and off-putting at the outset, nerve-wracking at the mid-point, and finally, highly collaborative and gratifying in the final going.
I’d seen Ron perform at the Zion Presbyterian Church in Charlottetown, PEI, on January 16, 2012, in a CBC television-produced tribute to the late PEI singer-songwriter Gene MacLellan, as part of the province’s annual Music Week. I had no idea at the time that two years later I’d be engulfed in his biography. He was one in a string of performers booked for a CBC made-for-television tribute to MacLellan. Called Just Biding My Time (the title of one of MacLellan’s best-loved tunes), it was aired on radio for CBC’s Atlantic Airwaves show and broadcast in June of that year on the full CBC television network. The cast featured PEI’s Lennie Gallant and MacLellan’s daughter, Catherine (a songwriter and performer in her own right).
Hynes revered MacLellan and had written the beautiful and stirring “Godspeed” in his honour, so it was a no-brainer for the show’s producers to have him on the bill. It was a lovely but, for two of the performers, torturous event, thanks to a succession of technical glitches. Ron and Lennie Gallant were forced to repeat their performances three times over before the show’s producers were sure they’d captured what they needed. Remarkably, Ron reached deep down and found the same level of emotion in take three as he’d offered up in the original. When the show aired six months later, the television audience would never know the difference.
Doing so took grace, patience, and professionalism. These moments shaped my first impressions of Ron. He not only managed to pull off the songs with genuineness, but in doing so, he made the audience grow increasingly sympathetic. Rolling his eyes in typical Ron fashion and expressing his disbelief at the producers, “You’ve got to be kidding,” he pulled the audience closer to him.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but the rolling of the eyes and his exasperation were part of the minute-to-minute theatre of Ron Hynes, the skill which his nephew Joel Hynes talks about when he says, “It’s as if the camera is always on…and it doesn’t matter if there is a camera around or not. There is always an element of the performance barrier up. You never know which side of him you’re gonna talk to.”
Nothing, it seems, could be more true.
My next exposure to Ron was in 2014 at the Trailside Café in Mount Stewart, PEI. The first thing he said from the stage was, “Hi Mac,” in recognition of the CBC broadcaster and East Coast Music Awards enthusiast Mac Campbell, who was seated at the edge of the stage with his wife, Edwina, and another couple. After acknowledging Campbell, he turned to the audience and subtly joked, feigning conceit, “I know people.” Before the year was out, Ron would make a highly personal pilgrimage to Campbell’s PEI home to perform a private concert just days before Campbell’s death from cancer at age sixty-nine. Before another year was out, Ron too was gone.
Ron and I spoke that night at the Trailside as I introduced myself at a distance of five or six feet between his first and second sets. I was suffering from a terrific cold and he was just coming off one. On explaining why I could not shake his hand, he waved me off with a look of horror on his face, not wanting a relapse of the bug which had aggravated his healing process from throat cancer, diagnosed and treated in 2012, and which had pretty well ruined his ability to perform all that Spring.
I was introducing myself and still in the pitch stage regarding his biography. Funnily, at the outset, I didn’t know whether to call him Ron or Mr. Hynes or Hynes. One is too familiar, another too formal, and the other too distant. A small part of me wanted to immediately get on his good side, vaunting him up by addressing him as Dr. Hynes, because he is one, thanks to his honourary doctorate from Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Even though Charles MacPhail was keener than hell, Ron seemed very much on the fence about it all. Over the coming weeks and months, I was never sure whether the biography was truly authorized or not. It would take months for me to feel the assurance that Ron was really on board. In hindsight, I slowly learned that this confusion over Ron’s being on board or not was directly linked to his substance abuse. It took getting to know the real Ron Hynes before I could comfortably develop the narrative and believe the book would come to be. That is, if anyone can really get to know the real Ron Hynes. He is easily the most complex person I have ever written about.
Readers may recognize that this book was re-written following Ron’s death; therefore, the verb tense has been changed to the past—a particularly arduous and heart-breaking process. However, in being true to the voices of the people I interviewed, their words remain in the present tense and in the context of when Ron was alive.
“He’s ours
and we’ve got to take
care of him.”
RIK BARRON
(Newfoundland singer, musician, and raconteur)
PART I
THE INNOCENCE
CHARLIE FREEBURN’S MEADOW
RON HYNES WAS BROUGHT UP IN the Roman Catholic school system in Ferryland, Newfoundland, where he was taught by convent nuns who lectured all the little children that a priest was greater than an angel because he represented God on earth and that it was a mortal sin to pass a church and not make a visit. In the world of Roman Catholicism, circa early-1960s, that was just the tip of the iceberg. There were also teachings about venial sin, mortal sin, the darkening of your soul, and the ultimate turpitude: because Ron and his classmates were all descendants of Adam and Eve, they shared a blight known as Original Sin, which only the sacrament of Baptism can erase.
Ferryland is a town on the south end of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula, a place originally established as a station for migratory fishermen in the late sixteenth century but which had earlier been used by the French, Spanish, and Portuguese. By the 1590s, it was one of the most popular fishing harbours in Newfoundland, a place noted, for example, by Sir Walter Raleigh. The town looks over the rough and raw Atlantic, noted for its long, high cape of rock and grass, for its lighthouse and lighthouse picnics and as the town’s website oddly proclaims, as “The birthplace of religious tolerance and freedom of worship in the New World.” (It was the first place in British North America where an English-speaking Roman Catholic priest said mass.)
When you say “Ferryland” to most people, they think you’re saying “Fairyland,” like it’s a place Disney built. The name is actually the blended Anglicization of Farilham, derived from the Portuguese fishermen, and Forillon by the French. The lands where Ferryland is today were granted by charter to the London and Bristol Company in the 1610s, and the vicinity became one of a number of short-lived English colonies. In 1620 the territory was granted to George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore (Lord Baltimore) whose namesake is Baltimore, Maryland. Lord Baltimore oversaw the establishment of the colony at Ferryland, which today remains a strong point of curiosity for archeologists. But there came a point at which Lord Baltimore simply found the weather exceedingly harsh and decided to move his family to the significantly fairer climate of Maryland. His parting words reportedly were, “I commit this place to the fishermen that are better able to encounter storms and hard weather.” Virtually forgotten for centuries, excavations of the original settlement began in the mid-twentieth century and were renewed in earnest, under the auspices of Memorial University, in the late 1980s, and continue to this day.
It is against this significant historical and noteworthy religious backdrop, all of it emphatically punctuated by the powerful presence of the sea, that Ron Hynes grew up and returned to in his final years.
One day, nine-year-old Ron was on his way home from school for lunch, passing Holy Trinity Church as he did every day. Something made him remember the teaching that a good Catholic should never pass by a church without paying a visit to God. Failure to do so was considered a sin, probably venial in nature, but still, a sin nevertheless. Whether venial or mortal in nature, Ron had been taught that any sin is certain to blacken one’s soul like something charred on a barbecue.
Once inside, Ron approached the altar, then turned his attention to the cascading bank of unlit vigil candles where parishioners would light, kneel, and pray before a statue of either Jesus or the Virgin Mary. The practice of lighting candles in order to obtain some favour probably originated in the custom of burning lights at the tombs of the martyrs in the catacombs. Ron decided to light a candle with one of the wooden stick matches that were always provided there. Lighting just one candle did not feel to be a sufficient degree of adoration to Ron, so he proceeded to light the works, bathing the interior of the church in candlelight. He lingered for a bit, but suddenly remembered that lunch awaited him at home. Before leaving, he snatched a handful of the wooden matchsticks.
As Ron left the glowing church, he decided to take the “above the road” route, as it was known in Ferryland, all the while playing with the matches.
“I’m playing that game where you balance the match on the brimstone with your index finger and snap it through the air, creating a flying-match-on-fire effect,” Ron recalled. “As I climbed the fence of Charlie Freeburn’s meadow, I snap a match which hurls its fiery way toward the tall, dry grass. The match lands and ignites the grass and sparks are jumping and starting tiny fires everywhere. I try to stamp them out, but they keep sparking and finally there are too many and I’m burning holes in my running shoes.”
So Ron panicked, jumped the fence and ran for home.
“On a tiny hill above our house, I turn like Lot’s wife and the entire harbour is obliterated with black smoke.”
Ron arrived home, acting as though nothing had happened, and sat and picked at his lunch in silence. On the way back to school, he encountered Charlie Freeburn furiously trying to rake out the flames. The entire field had burned to black, smoke rising everywhere.
“It’s a wonder his house survived but it had a rock and concrete foundation so there were no problems there, thank God. I decided I’d better throw him off the scent, so I approach the fence and say, ‘Hey Mr. Charlie, what are ya doin’, burnin’ your grass are ya?’ ”
“You did this Hynes,” said Mr. Freeburn. “I saw you jump the fence and run.”
“Go away, b’y,” said little Ronnie. “You’re crazy.”
Knowing Charlie Freeburn was on to what he’d done, Ron tore off lickety-split and headed straight back to school.
“I’m sitting in the last row writing note after note along the lines of ‘Dear Mr. Charlie, I knows you t’inks I burned down your meadow, but I didn’t.’ But it was hopeless. I was in hell.”
Walking home from school later that afternoon, he ran into young Calvin Johnson, who said, “Did you hear someone burned poor Mr. Charlie’s meadow. He sells that grass every year to make some money. What a cunt to do that.”
“Yeah, what a cunt,” Ron replied.
The plot was thickening.
The next day was a Saturday.
“Mom gives me five cents, so off I go to the store just up the road from the house and buy five Bazooka bubble gums. I know if I go home with them she’ll make me give one to each of my brothers and my sister, so I stuff all five in my mouth.
“I’m leaving the store with a mouth filled with Bazooka bubble gum and there’s the RCMP cruiser waiting outside. The cop gestures with his finger and I climb in the car and start to cry.”
“Where do you live?” Constable Frazer asks Ron.
“ ‘Right there,’ I say, crying with a mouth full of gum. He drives the few feet down the road and as we exit the cruiser, Calvin Johnson and a few other kids go by. They know. The whole town knows for Christ’s sake.”
“Well Mrs. Hynes,” says the constable, “do you know what your son’s gone and done?”
As Constable Frazer relates the entire crime to Ron’s mother, he asks, “What should we do, Mrs. Hynes? Perhaps a few days in jail on bread and water would do the trick.”
“My mother agrees of course. She just wants to get him out of the house and deal with it herself.”
Constable Frazer decides to leave matters in Mrs. Hynes’ hands and takes his leave.
A short spell went by.
“I’m sitting on the daybed in the kitchen, I’ve stopped crying, and I’m enjoying my Bazooka bubble gum.”
Mrs. Hynes busies herself, doing the dishes and sweeping the floor. The longer she labours, the more Ron convinces himself he’s out of the woods, that he’s in the clear. Never formally charged but acquitted nevertheless. He’s a free man. No jail cell with bread and water for him.
“But as she passes me on the daybed,” he recalls with perfect clarity, “she slaps me so hard across the face that it hurts to this very day.”
Ron was completely ostracized from the entire community for about a year. When his father came home from being at sea, he paid a visit to Mr. Freeburn and compensated him for his losses.
“I remember attending his funeral when he passed,” said Ron, “and thanking God that he hadn’t burned to death in his house.”
FERRYLAND
AS IN DOZENS OF OTHER NEWFOUNDLAND and Labrador communities, the lighthouse at Ferryland, about an hour south of the capital city of St. John’s, is a dominant icon. Brighter than the vigil candles at Trinity Catholic Church, the lighthouse at Ferryland Head has long stood as a beacon to passing ships, a stark warning of the dangerous jagged shores, yet a comforting reminder to sailors that they were not alone in the pitch-black night. The lighthouse is still operational; however, it has been automated since 1970. For the 100 years previous, the lighthouse was staffed by families who lived in the two-family dwelling. Today it’s famous for its popular Lighthouse Picnics, the brainchild of two women who’ve turned the place into a destination and part of the Canadian Tourism Commission’s Signature Experience Collection.
The first light-keeper was the famous Newfoundland ship builder Michael Kearney, and the first assistant keeper was William Costello. Over the next 100 years, the Costello family would be the primary keepers of the light at Ferryland Head right up until 1970, when Billy and Kathleen Costello were the last family of lighthouse keepers. Newfoundland’s renowned artist, the late Gerald Squires, and his family lived in the lighthouse dwelling during the 1970s, and it is here that Squires completed some of his finest work, including what is referred to as The Ferryland Downs series. Squires was Ron’s favourite artist.
Squires died just a few weeks before Ron, on October 3, 2015, and was best known as a landscape painter, though he also worked as a sculptor, a print maker, and a newspaper artist. Born in Change Islands, Squires moved to Toronto in 1949, where he lived (mostly) until he returned to Newfoundland. He was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1999 and shared with Ron the honour of a doctorate from Memorial University. They also shared the small but important connection that Squires painted an image of the Ferryland lighthouse on the resonator of a banjo Ron had at one time.
“It’s one of a number of instruments that escaped my hands over the years,” said Ron. “I’d love to have it back and will someday, God willing.”
Ferryland was at the core of Ron’s life, whether as an unwitting nine-year-old pyromaniac, or during his final years as one of Canada’s most prolific and admired songwriters. This is the place of his true roots, even though of the thirty-two people listed as settled at Ferryland in 1622, there wasn’t a Hynes amongst them.
More than a million artifacts have been unearthed as the result of archeological digs at Ferryland over the years, carried out in phases since the 1930s by a Dr. Brooks, an entomologist from the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. He concluded that Avalon was at the western end of a tombolo beach that connects the mainland with the Ferryland Downs and that this was the Colony of Avalon established by George Calvert (1579-1632) the first Lord (or Baron) Baltimore, a man who took an interest in the British colonization of the Americas, at first for commercial reasons and later to create a refuge for English Catholics. He became the proprietor of Avalon, the first sustained English settlement on the southeastern peninsula of Newfoundland. But with the winter temperatures, prevailing winds, and constant struggles of settlers, Sir George looked south to warmer climes and pursued a new royal charter to settle the region we now know as the state of Maryland.
The digs renewed in the late 1950s when a man named Russell Harper carried out test excavations on land adjacent to the south shore of The Pool, as the sheltered inner harbour has been known since at least the 17th century. Harper recovered ceramics, iron nails, bottle glass, and other artifacts. You can still see the archeological dig in progress today, halted seasonally of course as the winters can be brutal here. And you can visit the large, modern interpretive centre to view a mere fractional sampling of the countless artifacts unearthed, cleaned, catalogued, and stored away over the decades.
But the most famous artifact linked to Ferryland is Ron Hynes himself. Most of what usually comes out of the ground is splintered, scarred, or cracked, not unlike Ron in his final years, a mere shard of his previous sparkling self as entertainer, physical penance to his serious substance abuse. Apart from Lord Baltimore, Ron is the most famous favourite son of Ferryland, the once-youthful composer and performer, comedic straight man, and one of the few performers around who has a slogan synonymous with his name in the manner of Frank Sinatra or James Brown (The Chairman of the Board and Godfather of Soul, respectively). Ron is widely referred to and known as The Man of a Thousand Songs. The story behind that moniker has been told by Ron on stage and off a thousand times. One version is that when his agent at the time was trying to book him in Ireland, and the agent was asked questions like, “How many songs does he know?” or “What kind of songs does he play?” or “Does he want a set list?” Ron said, “Just tell them he knows a thousand songs.” In true Ron fashion, the next time he tells this story, it had nothing to do with Ireland whatsoever. In that version, his agent had been speaking to a guy booking Ron for the Holiday Inn in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
Except when touring or in Toronto visiting his girlfriend, Dr. Susan Brunt (sister of Canadian celebrity sports writer and broadcaster Stephen Brunt), or in his final days staying with a friend in St. John’s, Ron returned to the family home, a three-storey building vaulted up over the winding secondary highway also known as The Irish Loop, which links St. John’s to the southern tip of the Avalon Peninsula at Trepassey. Before his father died, Ron and his siblings were asked about their interests in it once their mother would be gone. Ron was the only one who responded, so he inherited the one thing in his life that resembled normalcy: the family home. Everything else in his life was momentary and transient.
RONALD ‘ST. JOSEPH’ HYNES
Dateline Annapolis, Maryland, September 19, 1967–Governor Spiro T. Agnew today issued a proclamation declaring September 20, 1967 as ‘Maryland-Ferryland Day’ in a reciprocal gesture to the government and the people of Canada and to the citizens of Ferryland, Newfoundland.
The proclamation called upon all citizens of Maryland “to observe this day, with the citizens of Canada, by honoring George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, whose courage, wisdom and foresightedness are manifest in his performance as a principal settler of Newfoundland and as and as the founder of the State of Maryland.”
IN RECIPROCAL RESPONSE TO GOVERNOR AGNEW’S proclamation, the people of Canada and Ferryland, in turn, paid homage to Lord Baltimore.
Back home in Ferryland, a dais was set and an event held with several hundred people present, presided over by Newfoundland’s founding Premier Joey Smallwood, the local federal Member of Parliament Richard Cashin, a host of other dignitaries, and seventeen-year-old Ron Hynes. The school hosting the event was named St. Joseph’s Central High. When Ron had been in grade school at Ferryland’s Holy Trinity Church, the parish priest, Father John Cotter, came to announce that construction was to begin on a new high school and he that he was soliciting students for a name for the school.
“I suggested St. Joseph’s because he was my patron saint and my baptismal name,” says Ron. “Who knew?” Ron mused.
Schools were closed for the day from Ferryland all the way to Trepassey; instead of being in their classrooms, students were bussed in for the ceremony. A dance and celebration held that night in the community rounded out the commemoration.
When he originally told me the story, Ron’s memory convinced him that Agnew had actually been in attendance in Ferryland that day. But the record from the Maryland state archives showed differently. While Agnew agreed to have the proclamation released, and he actually did read it aloud in Baltimore, it was Cashin who read the reciprocal version from the dais in Ferryland. But not before being introduced by the upstanding seventeen-year-old local student who, when he was finished, was congratulated at the mic by either Smallwood or Cashin for his effort (Ron couldn’t recall which). Whichever of the two politicians it was, he playfully remarked that young Ron would no doubt have a good future in politics, in deference to the succinct and orderly manner in which he had delivered his introductions. In literal terms, the politician’s playful comment could not have been more far off. But in other terms—in cultural-political terms—young Ron Hynes would go on to establish a name, create a persona, and make a statement on behalf of Newfoundland that would outweigh the value and impact of anyone else on the dais that day with the exception of Joey himself, the man who controversially brought Newfoundland into the Canadian Confederation in 1949; Joey, the proverbial god of what’s become known as The Rock.
Juxtapose that well-spoken student—the supposed politician in the making—against the life of the hard-living, troubadour musical phenomenon that Ron became.
MISTAKEN POINT
EVEN BY NEWFOUNDLAND STANDARDS, MISTAKEN POINT is a remarkably barren, rocky seaside landscape. Looking at the map of North America, the point hangs out there in the northwest Atlantic Ocean with its nearby Cape Race Light Station serving as a beacon to Europe and Africa. The station has been operating as a warning site to mariners since 1856. The most recent tower, erected in 1907, employs a giant hyper-radial Fresnel lens, one of the most powerful found anywhere in the world. Here is also where the Myrick Wireless Centre interprets the earliest wireless days of telegraphy in Newfoundland when Cape Race was one of the busiest Marconi stations in North America, including the fact that the distress call from the Titanic was first heard and answered here.
Mistaken Point is literally at the end of the road, on a truly continental scale, situated on the extreme margins of the Avalon Peninsula, hopelessly exposed to the whims and perils of the ocean and an extreme harshness of climate. Mistaken Point is said by some to be the fog and rain capital of Newfoundland, a province already well known for its fog and rain. Blanketed in fog for many months at a time, the fog horn at nearby Cape Race gets a continuous workout. For anyone who would care to reside here, there are copious amounts of time for reflection.
The site is two or more hours from St. John’s and about an hour south of Ferryland; accessed through the community of Portugal Cove South (Portugal Cove North is far away at an area north of St. John’s) and continuing along a rugged journey over a gravel road fraught with dips and boulders suitable only for a four-wheel-drive or a lunar rover.
If places had feelings or a conscience, Mistaken Point would surely feel sorrowful and ashamed. Because make no mistake, the point came by its shame honestly, taking its name from the deadly results of being mistaken for Cape Race in the area’s perpetually foggy weather. Sailors who made this mistake were fooled into turning north, thinking they had reached Cape Race Harbour, but instead would immediately run into the point’s treacherous rocks.
Those same rocks are now into payback. Because the site is home to some of the oldest fossils on earth, scientists and bureaucrats in bow ties and studious glasses from the United Nations Education and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) in Paris are deliberating over whether or not Mistaken Point should be declared a World Heritage Site. Pre-Cambrian in age, the geology holds the oldest known fossils of complex organisms, some 560-575 million years old, from a time when life only existed in the sea. A team of experts visited the site in 2015 as part of the World Heritage Site evaluation process, with their decision expected in 2016.
I am on a Mistaken Point mission, seeking out a place named Long Beach, which I know is in the vicinity. Unwisely, I risk the underbelly of a rented Chev Impala by churning its wheels over a rocky road completely ill-suited to anything but a raised four-wheel drive. As I pass the Edge of Avalon Interpretive Centre en route to the Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve, it becomes clearer with every passing metre why there are warnings on the centre’s door that it is off limits except by escorted guides and properly designed vehicles. Notwithstanding the perils of the road, local officials don’t want people monkeying around with the volcanic-ash-embedded fossil finds and other environmentally sensitive things. While there, for the record, I never touched a thing.
Driven by my curiosity and throwing caution to the wind, I plowed through the rock beds and maneuvered around imposing boulders. Along the way, I encountered a succession of uniform signs (designed and posted by the Edge of Avalon organization) which identify the following intriguing, locally derived place names: Drook, Rookery, Freshwater, Bob’s Cove, Bristol Cove, Mistaken Point itself, and ultimately, Long Beach. Along the way, there is something about their charcoal colour and the way they are etched into the land and seascape, which makes you appreciate that these really are, really old rocks.
A couple of kilometres on, there is a handful of tiny makeshift cabins by the side of this rarely traversed road, places used as modest summer retreats by locals. The foundations where there were a number of two-storey homes, are also in evidence. One of these belonged to the O’Neils.
Long Beach and the O’Neil home were the beginning of the road for Ron Hynes and his musicality, for this is where he met his uncle on his mother’s side, Thomas O’Neil. Most people call him Sonny—Sonny in Irish vernacular what Junior or Jr. is elsewhere. So it goes without saying that Sonny’s father’s name was also Thomas.
Long Beach was an important place in Ron’s life because it is where Thomas ‘Sonny’ O’Neil introduced him to both the guitar and the button accordion and the songs of such iconic, old-style country music stars as Ray Price, Johnny Cash, and Marty Robbins.
During his early teens, Ron would visit the O’Neils during the summer and hang out with Sonny, making for some of the most joyful and carefree moments of his life. That there were twelve years between the two, Sonny being the elder, didn’t seem to matter. In this remote and isolated place, there was nothing for Ron to do but spend endless hours of his adolescence free to roam and play and absorb Sonny’s love of music. The only distractions were the magnificence of the sea and the rocks.
There is innocence in the sense of Ron not knowing, spending these simple times with his uncle, that he was sowing the seeds for God’s ultimate gift to him, the internationally loved song, “Sonny’s Dream.”
Sonny, the real McCoy, is like all of the others who once lived at Long Beach—long gone from that place of isolation, contemplation, and freedom. He lives today in a meticulously kept condo in a quiet semi-residential/semi-commercial area of St. John’s. He’s a serene, completely unassuming man in his late seventies, living alone amid older but well-maintained furnishings and knick-knacks. Apparently Sonny was never married, never had children, and had fairly ordinary jobs throughout his life. One career effort at being a signalman didn’t work out because he has weak eyesight. Music is a part of Sonny’s past and not his present.
Sonny hasn’t got much to say about his fame, as it were, about the fact that his name has been sung about countless times around the world. And as characterized in the song, he no longer sits watching the sea from the stairs, town is no longer a hundred miles away, and his dream is far simpler than what Ron portrayed in “Sonny’s Dream.” More to the point, the dream was not Sonny O’Neil’s dream at all. The dream was all Ron’s. It was about his life. “Sonny’s Dream” is, we discover, Ron’s autobiography.
“He went to St. John’s and
the musical world of Canada.
That was his dream.”
GREG MALONE
(Wonderful Grand Band alumnus)
PART II
THE MUSIC
DEL SHANNON
NOT TOO LONG AFTER BURNING DOWN Charlie Freeburn’s meadow and parts of summers spent at Mistaken Point with his Uncle Sonny and family, Ron began to develop his own music sensibility beyond the stylings of Sonny’s favourites—Ray Price, Johnny Cash, and Marty Robbins—and the few figures in Newfoundland who were known for making music, including Harry Hibbs. Following Ron’s introduction to the instrument, Hibbs would be loosely tied to his early attachment to the button accordion.
“There was one in the house at Long Beach, at my grandmother’s place. I remember trying to get something out of it.”
But the accordion quickly fell by the wayside when his father brought home his first guitar, what would now be a vintage SS Stewart six-string, which Ron described as an archtop, orchestra-style guitar, hand-made in the style of a fine cello with a natural varnish finish, tortoise shell trim, and real mother of pearl fret inlays. Thomas had picked it up in Frobisher Bay, of all places, and had written to Ron’s mother, Mary, to say he was bringing it home. Ron said he could hardly wait over the days and weeks to see the taxi pull up into the yard with his father and the guitar in tow. He remembers his father’s taxi driver being a Delahunty man from Calvert who came into the house and tuned it for Ron.
“It laid around for a year,” said Ron, “till I finally delved into it and just fell in love.”
It took, and for “days and days and days,” Ron applied himself and learned the Harry Hibbs song, “Roses Are Blooming,” even though he would have heard Hibbs performing the tune while accompanying himself on the accordion, not the guitar.
Roses are blooming, come back to me darling,
Come back to me darling and never more roam;
Robins are singing, church bells are ringing,
Roses are blooming, so come back my own.
The days have been long dear, the nights have been dreary,
I missed you my darling since you went away;
But still I kept hoping that you would remember,
That you would remember and come back some day.
Roses are blooming, come back to me darling,
Come back to me darling and never more roam;
Robins are singing, church bells are ringing,
Roses are blooming, so come back my own.
On another trip, Ron’s father bought him a grey fedora, which of course became the signature part of his look. So between the guitar and the fedora, Ron says his father invented Ron Hynes, that he started his career for him without ever knowing it.
“If only he’d known what he was doing,” said Ron.
From then on, Ron was naked without a guitar draped around his neck. But his talent for playing instruments was vastly more versatile. He quoted a line to me from John Lennon, where Lennon says, “I’m an artist. Give me a tuba and I’ll get you something out of it.” That line comes from the extensive, two-part 1971 Rolling Stone magazine John Lennon interview, part one of which was titled, “The Working Class Hero.”
“Dylan introduced us all to the harp rack as accompaniment to the guitar,” said Ron, an accompaniment frequently associated with Lennon as well. “So I did that a lot in the early coffeehouse days, and when the Grand Band started up, everyone had a guitar, so I opted for banjo and mandolin. In high school I studied piano and at one point played for an entire school concert. I’m fascinated by the dobro and saxophone, though I’ve never played either. Well, life is long,” he added, suggesting he just might yet, but unfortunately, he never got the chance.
Ron’s early curious music sensibility went far beyond Uncle Sonny’s favourite country artists and the Newfoundland-ness of Harry Hibbs, toward the discovery of his very own musical heroes. Ron abandoned piano to try and learn Buddy Holly’s hit “Rave On,” but no one was more important or formative to Ron than the 1950-60s teen idol, Del Shannon.